Congregational Vitality Assessment

A window into the vitality of your congregation

We are pausing access to the Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA) while we migrate it to a new and more stable platform and upgrade some of its features. We anticipate the migration will be complete and the CVA accessible again in January 2025.

We appreciate your patience and look forward to your return. Watch this space for updates.

The Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA) is a ground-breaking research-based, online diagnostic tool designed to provide a congregation with an assessment of its Vitality (how healthy it is) and its Sustainability (whether it has the people, financial, and contextual resources necessary to survive). The CVA ground-breaking 

CVA Single Congregation Version is available for a nominal fee. It can be completed by a single congregational leader or a representative congregational leadership group (the latter is preferred).

The CVA measures 11 areas of congregational vitality, including:

  1. Vision, Mission, and Discernment
  2. Lay Engagement and Empowerment
  3. Context Awareness and Inclusion
  4. Change Readiness
  5. Dealing with Differences and Conflict
  6. Worship
  7. Spiritual Life
  8. Formation, Education, and Training
  9. Outreach
  10. Leadership and Organization
  11. Stewardship. 

It also measures internal and external congregational sustainability.

The CVA Single Congregation Version is made available to congregations of all denominations and religions by a partnership between The FaithX Project and the Episcopal Church Foundation.

Also available on a subscription basis it the CVA Judicatory Platform, a customized dashboard through which a judicatory can directly administer the CVA to each of its congregations, receive anonymized results (including supplemental, non-scored questions), and monitor their results over time.

A Judicatory Vitality Assessment too will soon be available on a subscription basis, as well.

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA)

 

What is the purpose/benefits of the Congregational Vitality Assessment (or CVA)?

The Congregational Vitality Assessment is designed to help a congregation:

  • Diagnose its Vitality and Sustainability
  • Identify its strengths and weaknesses
  • Develop and prioritize strategies to address them
What is the difference between a congregation’s Vitality and its Sustainability?
Vitality: Is the congregation thriving, surviving, or declining?
Sustainability: Does the congregation have the people, financial, and contextual resources necessary to survive and thrive?
What elements of Vitality does the CVA measure?

The CVA measures how effectively a congregation is carrying out ten vital areas of congregational functioning:

  1. Vision, Mission, & Discernment
  2. Lay Engagement & Empowerment
  3. Context Awareness & Inclusion
  4. Change Readiness
  5. Dealing with Differences/Conflict
  6. Spiritual Life & Worship
  7. Formation, Education, & Training
  8. Outreach
  9. Leadership & Organization
  10. Stewardship
What elements of Sustainability does the CVA measure?

The CVA measures two important aspects of congregational functioning:

  • Internal Sustainability: Whether the congregation has sufficient internal resources (people, financial, and other) to survive, thrive, and carry out its mission.
  • External Sustainability: Whether the neighborhoods the congregations serves have sufficient resources (people, financial, and other) to sustain a typical congregation.
How is the CVA best administered (what are best practices)?

To get the most benefit for your congregation from the CVA, follow these suggested best practices:

Designate an Assessment Initiator

It will be important to designate a single individual to be the CVA initiator. This person will:

1. Register the congregation on the CVAtools.org site.

2. Receive the confirmation email – note that it has two different links, each of which has a specific function:

  • One that the initiator will use to start the survey (by taking it first) and later to review, download, and share the results.
  • The other to share those with the selected survey group, so that they can access and complete the survey.

3. Sample Composition and Size

For congregations with over 50 active members we recommend a representative sample of no more than 25 people (i.e., NOT the entire congregation). In most cases a sample of 15 people is perfectly adequate as long as it is a representative subset of the makeup of the congregation.

For Congregations with fewer than 50 active members. Obviously, it is never a good idea to give something to half the congregation and leave the other half out. In such a case, congregation wide implementation is recommended, but leadership may need to interpret the results in light of the biases this might produce.

What do we mean by a representative sample. By a representative sample we mean representative of both the leadership structure of church and its demographic make up. In other words, a group that captures the full diversity of your congregation, including but not limited to:

  • Age (young, old, and in-between)
  • Gender and Sexuality (straight and LGBTQ)
  • Ordination Status (ordained & lay)
  • Race-Ethnicity-Language-Country of Origin
  • Congregational Ministry (worship, formation, outreach, etc.)
  • Socio-Economic Diversity
  • Any other criteria that makes sense for your congregation

To determine what your representative sample should look like:

  • Start with a core group composed of vestry, committee chairs, and committee members.
  • Study the makeup of your congregation.
  • Determine which groups are under-represented in the sample group (or the congregation).
  • Invite someone representative of all the above groups.

There are several reasons we recommend this:

  • Regression toward the mean (also called reversion to the mean or reversion to mediocrity). The more random variables introduced the greater the likelihood of everything coming out average.
  • Imbalanced Results. Results are weighted in favor of people who are natural test-takers and tends to leave out people who don’t like to take them.
  • Samples tend to be non-representative, with results biased toward certain groups (e.g. more Boomers and GenX-ers than Millennials and GenZ-ers, more insiders than newcomers, fewer financially challenged people, etc.).

Invite, Don’t Advertise

Once you have determined what a representative group should look like, select individuals that represent the various groups you have identified, and personally/individually invite them. Explain how the results can benefit the congregation. Ask them more than once if necessary. Start with the congregation’s governing board, supplement them with ministry chairs, then fill in the holes with congregation members. Explain to each person why their input is important.

Remind, Remind, Remind

Inform the participants that they will have until 14 days after the CVA was initiated (provide the exact date) to complete the assessment, and that on the 15th day you will receive the results.

Remind the those who will be taking the CVA at several points during the 14-day assessment period:

  • 7 days before the deadline.
  • 4 days before the deadline.
  • 1 day before the deadline.
  • On the day of the deadline

Share the Results

Share the CVA results with the congregation in concentric circles, working outward:

  • Church governing board.
  • Ministry chairs and members.
  • Congregation Wide.

Pro-Tip:

Put the results in a spreadsheet and create a barchart, then:

  • Highlight the top 3 vitality areas of strength. The congregation can leverage these strengths to engage missional opportunities.
  • Highlight the 3 areas most in need of improvement. The congregation may wish to supplement these by collaborating with other congregations with strengths in those areas.
  • Draw an arrow from the Internal Sustainability score to the External Sustainability score. This provides the congregation with an indication of the direction in which it might be headed sustainability-wise.

Discern how God is speaking to you through the data

Yes, data can play an important role in congregational discernment, by helping you look into your blind spots and overcome your unconscious biases.

Pro-Tip:

For best discernment results, request a Neighborhood Insights Report (from FaithX), then:

  1. Explore the NIR, looking for significant missional opportunities and challenges (which can be turned into opportunities).
  2. Compare the dominant population segments to your congregational membership (we can help with this).
  3. Sit at the confluence of these two data streams and seek God’s voice in the data (we can help with this, as well).

Need help in interpreting and reflecting on any of the above?

Contact FaithX at info@faithx.net

What makes the CVA unique?
Prescriptive professional analysis tools for congregational life have been around in many forms for a while, and offer congregations concrete ways to view their mission, ministry, and corporate life together. However, no other vitality assessment tool to date is as thoroughly grounded in research and data, and most come with high price tags that are cost prohibitive for many communities of faith to use.
What kind of questions does the CVA ask? What do the answers look like?
The CVA asks the user to answer 5-10 question in each of 12 areas of congregational life: 10 focused on vitality and 2 on sustainability.
What do CVA results look like?
When the individual or team has completed the CVA, the answers are scored, and the individual or team leader then receives summary scores of each of the ten vitality areas and two sustainability areas, along with suggestions of ways to improve in each of the areas.
How should we interpret our congregations scores?
CVA diagnostic ratings are based on a criterion-referenced (not on a curve) 1-4 scale:

3-4: High
2-3: Moderate
1-2: Low

What are research sources on which the CVA is grounded?
Why does the CVA give rate lower congregations that have an endowment and use it for operating expenses? What’s wrong with that?
All CVA questions are grounded in research, and research suggests that using an endowment to underwrite operating expenses (including ongoing outreach) negatively affects individual and congregational stewardship over the long term. Endowments aren’t forever. That means that congregations that grow dependent on them are much more likely drive off the proverbial cliff when the money runs out.
How often is the CVA updated based on new research and user feedback?

The CVA is updated at the end of any year in which vitality-related research is newly released or user feedback results in changes. For example, user feedback as so far led to:

  • CVA Version 2.O (release date: mid-July): redesigned user interface, added section on “External Sustainability,” back-end improvements to support research and benchmarking, bug fixes.
  • CVA Judicatory Version (launch date: mid-July): developed at request of multiple users, a subscription-based customized dashboard that allows, dioceses, synods, districts, and other judicatory bodies to administer the CVA to their congregations, add supplemental (non-rated) questions of their own, and have access to summarized results from all of their congregations.
  • CVA Version 2.1 (release date: Sept 2021): Spanish-language option, vitality improvement resources linked to scores/recommendations, new denomination-specific options.

We invite our users to notify us of new research or ideas for improvement at this address: info@faith.net.

What should our congregation do after taking the CVA?

There are several things a congregation can do after taking the CVA. These include:

  • Review CVA results and recommendations with congregational leadership and with the congregation. Identify your congregation’s 2-3 areas of greatest vitality strength and 2-3 areas of greatest vitality weakness.
  • Conduct a demographic assessment of the missional opportunities and challenges in community your congregation serves. Identify the 2-3 greatest missional opportunities and the 2-3 greatest missional challenges.
  • Find consensus around greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. Select 1-2 of each.
    Identify the areas of congregational vitality strength that you can leverage to effectively engage missional opportunities and challenges in the community, and to effectively address areas of congregational vitality weakness.
    Identify strategies to engage identified community opportunities and challenges, and address identified areas of vitality.
  • Determine which strategies you feel capable pursuing yourselves and which you might need help with.
    Implement strategies. Start small, experiment, build on successes.

The above process is what we call a Missional Assessment. You can do it yourselves or you can engage FaithX to lead you through it (we meet with your congregational leader in four sessions over a 6-8 week period to guide you through the process).

Contact us at info@faithx.net for more information or to schedule a free 30-min discussion to weigh your alternatives.